Shiny in Production: Chris Brownlie - Anatomy of a Shiny app

Anatomy of a Shiny app by Chris Brownlie at the Shiny in Production 2023 conference, hosted by Jumping Rivers!
Abstract
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Have you ever wondered what really goes on under the hood of a Shiny app? What the building blocks are and how they fit together to enable us to build reactive web apps using R? Shiny apps are made up of a collection of objects that all link with each other and external sources to make the app work. These objects and methods interact in various ways in order to: start up the app, build the reactive graph, handle reactivity and much more. In addition to this, the inner workings of Shiny rely on the use of other, less well‐known R packages.
In this presentation I’ll be exploring the building blocks of Shiny ‐ such as the Shiny Session, reactive context and reactive log ‐ as well as the key functions provided by Shiny’s dependencies, giving a high‐level overview of how they fit together and what they are each responsible for in the lifecycle of an app. I’ll also discuss how understanding these can be useful when debugging or monitoring a production Shiny app.
This event was sponsored by:
- Jumping Rivers
- National Innovation Centre for Data
- NU Solve
- Posit
- R Consortium
- Royal Statistical Society